Guidelines for eMail Newsletters

- Wednesday, December 19, 2007

In Online Marketing, eMail Newsletter Campaigns plays a major role to reach maximum number of audience. eMail Newsletter is one of the easiest ways to market your products, events, offers etc. Your eMail Newsletter Design might look great in one eMail client, but chances are when you open the same eMail in a different eMail client the results may not be the same.

To be sure that the eMail Newsletter is reaching to the end users properly without any formatting issue(s) and getting displayed properly to the end users, follow the below guidelines.

HTML Code Validation: Normally the eMail Newsletters are in HTML format, and should be validated properly before final send-out, there should not be any missing tags or extra tags. You can use W3C Validator to validate your pages.

Finally never forget to do HTML Unicode Entity Converter to the special characters. Always place your company logo on the top left side of the eMail. Grab users attention by your eMail headline(s). Try to avoid CSS (Style Sheets) in your eMail Newsletters no matter if its Inline, Embedded, or External CSS, use HTML font tags

by using font tags we can make sure that the eMail will display fonts properly in any mail client. Also all links should open in new window (e.g. target="_blank").

Text eMail: Keep your text eMail content simple, direct and to the point on your offer in short statements and bulleted text. Limit your each line length to 70 characters to prevent unwanted wrapping. Don't attempt to create boxes with characters like "-" and "". Use dashes (-) and asterisks (*) as separators for different sections of the message. All links should be on its own line with some additional text.)

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User will be able to distinguish the links and the text, and also reduces the chances of broken links or unwanted wrapping by eMail client.

Images: Don't use images for important contents like headlines, calls to action and links to your web site. Outlook, Gmail and many others mail clients turn off images until allowed by the user. Use ALT tags properly in all images for better user experience also use the height and width to the image to ensure that the images are displaying properly without any formatting issue(s) and getting displayed properly to the end users. Limit the images in you eMail, use image only for your compnay logo, eMails banner, product picture and spacer images.

Subject Line: Keep the subject lines short and brief, don't uses SPAM Words like (FREE, Viagra, Casino, discounts, $$$ etc.) in your subject lines. Take your time to write a meaningful subject line and void all capital letters subject lines. Use your company or brand name in "from name", "reply-to" and "subject line".

Spam: Always ask your subscribers to add your From Address into their Address Book. (To ensure delivery directly to your inbox, please add info@example.com to your address book today.) This will make sure that your eMail reaches to their mailbox everytime and not going to Junk/Bulk/Spam. Check for any broken link(s) before final send-out for better user experience. Have a unsubscribe link at the bottom of the eMail, give your users a quick way to unsubscribe from your mailing list. In many countries, it's actually mandatory by law that every eMail Newsletter has to have an unsubscribe link.

Avoid Scripts: Don't ever use JavaScript or any other kind of scripts (Flash, VB Scripts, Forms iFrames etc.) into your eMail Newsletters. There is no better way to have your newsletter marked as spam and getting your domain name blacklisted.